Days of Jade, Nights of Onyx
by Elliott Silver
Summary: A pastiche of scenes from Jack and Phryne's newest joint venture. Jack may send her reeling, but he won't let her fall.
1. Plural

Title: Days of Jade, Nights of Onyx

Author: Elliott Silver

Timeline: Set in series 2 after "Blood at the Wheel" and to the first half of "Juana the Mad" …

Summary: "_It's getting late/And while I wait/My poor heart aches on/Why keep the brakes on?_"

Feedback: Oh, yes please. Multi-parter: yay or nay?

Note: This is for Idolatrous, who reminded me to write.

* * *

/ - / - / - /

* * *

They have dinner, because they always do.

They adjourn to the parlor for drinks, because they always have.

They talk – nothing special – and play cards (they'd given up on checkers since the death of Gertrude Haynes). She's watched the play of Jack Robinson's hands as he shuffles the deck, the twist and flex of the tendons beneath his skin.

He makes it look easy, but now it's her turn. She deals two hands and picks one up.

She doesn't like what she's been dealt.

And she doesn't mean the paper kings and queens between her fingers.

It's been different since the car crash, since he thought she died. Something's different, off-kilter. It's like the world turned sideways when she wasn't looking, and she doesn't know how to put it right.

"I just want to see her," he'd said to Collins, who related it to Dot, who'd then told her. Phryne hadn't seen the detective stand there at the wrecked car, hand held to his mouth as he pulled his hat from his head, trying so desperately not to shake, not to break. No, she had only seen the shocked expression on his face as he pulled the white cloth over the dead woman's face – and that wasn't an unusual reaction really.

She hadn't paid attention then to utter paleness of his face, the sweat on his skin, that anguished look in his eyes.

So she was flippant and uncaring, unseeing when all the signs were right in front of her.

"I found it unbearable," he'd said later and she'd though he was being melodramatic.

Now she knows (hadn't she before?) that Jack Robinson is a man of his word.

"I don't want you to go," he'd told her, "I _need_ you to go."

But he was quicker, he walked away first, through those gorgeous heavy wood doors with glass windows that stained the floor red as if with blood. He left her standing there alone.

She fumes.

She sulks.

She mopes.

Then she grieves.

The loss was, as he told her, unbearable. A cold devastation rocks her soul and she falters.

The world as she knows it no longer makes sense, and she is lost.

Jack, her sense of direction, is gone.

Only now does Phryne understand his reaction, when he was called to a scene of death he believed to be her own. The loss of his friendship, the essential presence of his figure in her life, is a death of its own.

What hurts most is the thought, and then the knowledge, that she might be replaceable – to him – that he might be able to cut her from his life the way she could never do for him.

Irked and spurned, she tries to forget him. It doesn't work. There are other men, of course, but none fill the spaces of her heart the way Jack Robinson does without even trying.

None of them can fill her dreams, or satisfy the demands of her body.

Their lithe beauty can't satiate her need for the tidy fit of his suit jacket over his shoulders when she peers over him, the weight of his hand on the small of her back as he guides her through doors, through dangers, the way the hairs at the back of his neck curl outward instead of under when they grow long.

She knows how to take care of herself. She doesn't need anyone – least of all, a lover – to do what she can finish herself. But now she sees a face – only one, of course – when she closes her eyes, and her touch when it breaks, is hollow and unsatisfying.

Jack Robinson has never asked her to change – he wouldn't, God love him – so she will.

She can't – won't – live in this half life of pretending. She's always prided herself on being a woman who needs nothing, but now she realizes how vain and foolish that pride is. If that admittance is a sacrifice, she will make a thousand more.

So she's bathed (in bergamot) and dressed (in lilac), dabbing perfume behind her ears (stephanotis), because that's how it goes. She's made plans (her diaphragm) and changed (into green), because that's how it works too.

"I should go," he says, because he always does.

He moves towards the door to gather his coat and hat.

"Jack," she says, because she never has.

He turns towards her, letting all the shadows of the world fall across his face.

She goes to him before he can object, pressing her hands against his chest for balance. Her fingers smooth the lines of his lapels, the grey wool of his ever-present suit.

The world wavers around them, indistinct and unimportant. A car passes on the road outside, a telephone rings in another house. Somewhere, someone is shouting (but not for them).

They are so close she can smell the warm scent of soap on his skin, the pomade swirled in his chestnut hair, the whisper of whisky as he breathes.

Sometimes, she learns, the first move isn't about bluffing, but about playing the cards you have.

She breathes, and that's all it takes, all that has ever mattered.

His hands come around her chin, cradling her jaw and tipping her face upward so he can see her and only then does he kiss her. He slides a warm hand over her spine, bringing them even closer. She can feel each pad of his fingers as his hips roll against hers, his rise filling her hollows, the wedge of his belt catching on the seam of her dress.

By the look on his face, when they finally come apart, she knows she's done it then, knows that she's broken not only his resistance but her own fear.

Because, isn't this, this man and what she feels for him, what scares her more than anything else? Because, isn't this, this undiminished need for him (she won't call it what it really is), what terrifies her most?

"This is happening," she says simply, bravely.

"Yes," he confirms, honestly, miraculously, and with that, their words make it real.

She holds onto him as if she needs balance, and maybe she does. Her eyes are dark with desire, of an ending she's always known and a journey she does not.

It begins here, now.

She shivers (though she isn't cold) and slides a hand down his arm, afraid to break touch with him. In the darkness he twines his fingers through hers as they climb the stairs in the sleeping house to her bedroom.

There's no hesitation, no holding back, not now. They, neither of them, needs to ask what the other wants, whether they are sure. They are, and there's just this, this wonder of it, the making real of what has for so long been only a dream.

In the darkness he removes his tie, his waistcoat, his shoes. She scrubs off her dress, her stockings, her garters. They remove everything until there's nothing left, not even a pin in her hair.

They come together before the mirror. He turns her towards it, pulling her in front of him so their bodies are flush with one another.

He watches her reflect in its silvery surface.

In the mirror his eyes pin hers, holding them together as he takes her – the many reflections of her – in.

Her dark hair haloes around her pale face, her body a series of angles and curves that fit only here, with him, his arm around her waist, his hand splayed on the bone of her hip like a flower in bloom.

Her jade eyes are bright in the onyx darkness.

For a moment they stand without moving, breathing in the simple refraction of their selves.

For once, now, they see each other the way they always should have been, together.

Then Jack moves in the husky darkness and the picture changes.

He maps the contours of her skin, the cartography of flesh made memory. His hands drift from belly to throat, his fingers lingering where her pulses races under the pads of his thumbs. They swirl over her shoulders, down the lines of her arms to the twist of her wrists, trailing their way back over her elbows, her collarbones, the cove of her chest where she breathes.

Behind she feels the rub of him against her.

His hand dips to the crease of her thigh, the dark triangle where her leg slides into something different altogether. His fingers trace the warm fissure of her body, and a bud of frenzy builds inside her. A shiver runs from core to shoulders.

"This is happening," he says, and his voice rumbles over her.

"Yes," she breathes.

She never imagined that he would be so forward, so blunt in his loving of her, but then she's learning there's so many things about Jack Robinson that she couldn't possibly have guessed, beginning with just how much he's wanted her, how much he loves her, this way his eyes hold her as she falls, the dark delight of it all as she crashes in his arms.

She twirls in his hold, then, turning her back on their images. Before her now he is real, not a reflection. Her fingers knot in the hair of his chest, and he growls as she pulls less than playfully, as she explores the tense contours of his torso, lavishing him with her mouth and fingertips wherever she can reach him. The growth of his stubble rubs at her jaw, roughness where she hadn't expected any.

He feels her smile against his skin as she kisses the round of his shoulder, the soft (not innocent) flutter of her eyelashes as her fingers slip lower and take him into her palm.

He swallows hard as she kisses him where his pulse beats.

Phryne wonders how that looks in the mirror, but she doesn't need to see it to know how beautiful it is. She imagines the tilt of his head turned back for her, the curl of her body around his, the sinuous twisting of two bodies slowly merging and becoming one.

She brings him to the edge of her bed, sinking into the dark sheets and pulling his body over hers.

For the first time she feels the weight of him, the sparse heft of his body pushing the breath from her, and she marvels at the joy of it.

After this night they will be linked by their own desire; their bodies will forever carry marks of the other, invisible but no less indelible.

She reaches for him, guiding him between them so he slides between the cradle of her hips, welcomed into the folds of her body.

Time sluices over them, unchained, the buckles of the world come undone. She comes first, in a great sob, and he follows. Finally they let go and at last come together.

Boneless and spent they slide against each other. They are slippery to touch, their skins slick with sweat, and his kiss when she meets it with her mouth is achingly tender. Breath fans their wet faces, cool and intimate. She kisses him and tastes salt, closing her eyes only to the resonance of their hearts.

* * *

/ - / - / - /

* * *

He wakes in a rush, as if he might miss something, head thrust from the pillow as if he's already late. He takes in the light at the window, the sun in the mirror, the moss-green expanse of rumpled sheets thrown carelessly over her bare skin.

Jack Robinson looks alarmed, relieved, and amazed all at once. She knows how he feels.

"It did happen," he says. "I wasn't dreaming."

Phryne shifts under the sheets.

"Perhaps it could happen again?" she teases, and she brings her mouth to his before he can answer. The kiss is warm and slow as the slide of his hands on her skin.

Downstairs the telephone rings, and all too soon there's a tentative knock at the door.

"Miss?"

Her mouth bridges the curl of his shoulder as his fingers sink low and she gasps.

"Hugh's just rung," Dot calls through the door. "There's been a murder at the docks. Will you come right away?"

Jack's mouth stops tracing the line of her ear, teasing the lobe with his tongue, and Phryne falls back in frustration.

"This _isn't_ happening," they vent in tandem.

They look at each other and that's all it takes. She dissolves in giggles and the room is filled with the full richness of his laugh. They are giddy with the newness of this, this first bond, this promise, this hope.

"Yes, Dot dear," she finally calls back, when they manage some semblance of seriousness. "Tell Hugh we'll be there directly."

Outside the door there is a startle and stumble of footsteps, a pause at the plural of the answer. But downstairs the kettle's whistling and the car's being brought around, and water rushes in a bath being filled.

Inside the floor is strewn with their clothes, the bed heady with the scent of their sex, but somehow the world is back on kilter. The partnership, a new one with different boundaries, has been restored.

The game is on.

"Murder at the docks," Jack repeats.

Phryne Fisher grins.

"I'll see you there."

* * *

/ - / - / - /


	2. Zusammen

Title: Days of Jade, Nights of Onyx

Chapter 2: Zusammen

Author: Elliott Silver

Timeline: Set after the end of "Death on the Vine" …

Summary: A pastiche of scenes from Jack and Phryne's newest joint venture. Sometimes moving forward is as much about going back as it is forging ahead.

Feedback: Is lovely, but not nearly as lovely as readers like you. Thank you.

* * *

/ - / - / - /

* * *

"Phryne."

She's standing on his doorstep when Jack opens the soft knock.

She's never been here before, but she wouldn't be much of a detective if she couldn't find out where he lives.

(He blames Collins.)

Outside the sky is dark and wounded, as if it will drop its guts over Melbourne. A storm is coming, lightning already lashing out across the clouds, and not far behind it, the growl of thunder.

She waits.

Finally he steps back and lets her in, closing the door behind them.

* * *

/ - / - / - /

* * *

Somehow it all began to unravel.

The bright light of day can make you think differently about things that happen in the dark of night. Things that seem so reasonable, so right, suddenly become absurd and impossible.

That's the thing with … _things_. They begin perfectly and end messily.

Jack Robinson knew that this, she, them, wouldn't be easy but he didn't expect it to be so bloody hard.

Suddenly they've stopped dancing _around_ each other without yet knowing how to dance _with_ each other.

It's like they're no longer on the same page; hell, Jack thinks, they're not even in the same damn library.

It's like they don't know each other anymore – or, rather, know each other far too well, are now dangerously privy to the innermost secrets of the other, like where a bullet has crossed through his shoulder blades, where a scar hides just under her hairline from stray shell fragment.

It's too much too soon, or perhaps, too late.

Their interactions become stilted and awkward, limited only to those times she comes by his office or he drops by her house, interactions that are strictly restrained because others are present. Her debonair nonchalance is downright painful. His silence aches.

He thinks, only they could cock it up as spectacularly as this.

He doesn't know where to begin so he starts with her name.

"Phryne – "

The syllables echo in his office but she cuts him off before he can say more.

"Jack, it's nothing."

Her voice is brittle and the emphasis is inflected in all the wrong places.

Collins calls him from the outer office and she looks grateful for the distraction.

Jack walks forward and pauses only slightly right next to her, where he can still feel her. He keeps his eyes resolutely straight-ahead. His voice is quiet but his words are sharp enough to cut flesh.

"Really? Because I thought it was _something_."

She goes and he lets her.

He lets her because she doesn't want him to make her stay. It's the one thing he's always promised himself, that he would never ask her to change.

Now he wonders if that's a promise he's prepared to break.

He doesn't know she's gone (or rather, how far gone) until she calls and asks for his help. He goes because she asked, and because she'd never done that before. (And where the bloody hell is Maiden Creek anyway?)

She says he came to her rescue. ("Is that what I did?")

She buys him a hat. ("For the next woman who uses you for target practice.")

So they drink wine and don't talk about it. They are remarkably civil, polite even, about not remembering (which is not forgetting) how the suck of his mouth on her nipples makes her cry out, or the way the slide of her hand over his hip makes him rise against her.

This time he walks out the door and she lets him.

As if it really is nothing, as if his _something_ was always and only a dream.

* * *

/ - / - / - /

* * *

Now she comes into his space as if she belongs there.

She doesn't come in slowly, but he knows she doesn't miss anything either.

He wouldn't call this _home_ (neither would she), but surprisingly it's been a place of shelter and even solace for him. It's not large or elaborate (neither of which he's ever needed), and it suited him just fine when he needed a space of his own, a place without Rosie, and away from her. The old beaux-arts building houses three bachelor apartments, two on each level, with one on the ground floor for the elderly housekeeper. His co-tenants include a mathematics professor and cellist, the former prone to leaving scraps of papers scrawled with impossible equations across the hallways and the latter attached to playing sonatas in the wee hours of the morning.

The span of his rooms is dominated by the shelves of books against the left wall as she comes in, tomes he's spent a lifetime acquiring and reading. Tall windows let in light opposite, flanking a brick fireplace that never draws correctly. The pale walls are bare except for a framed police commendation and his certificate upon achieving rank of Senior Constable before the war. From where she stands Phryne can just barely see the edge of light from the narrow kitchen, and even less, the darkness of the room where he sleeps, where he dreams.

There's very little furniture, just a low table plastered with police paperwork, flanked by two armchairs – one of which he uses and one he does not. His suit jacket is strung across the latter, his navy tie skewed with it. A hat brush and shoe care kit sit peacefully in its lap.

She shrugs off her beige overcoat as if it's a burden, dropping it across his suit jacket. She tips her maroon hat onto the table where it pinwheels lopsidedly on its crown, the curved brim belly-up. Underneath her dress is the color of tiger-lilies.

Phryne Fisher blooms wherever she goes.

There's a hint in the air of a fish and chip supper, not too long ago consumed, and the hoppy brew of beer – Melbourne Bitter – from a bottle amidst the paperwork. (He needs it – if he realized he'd have to complete forms in triplicate for the Maiden Creek murders, he might very well have left Phryne to the graces of Sergeant Ford.) The scent of cologne and aftershave is stronger here, with undercurrents of once-wet wool and leather polish. Damp ink rests heavy in the humid air.

She picks up his beer and drinks as she walks towards the shelves.

This is who he is, too. If she wants to know him she will have to read him, and she does, running her fingers over the spines of his books. She starts in the far corner with his set of _Encyclopedia Britannica_, second-hand and rough around the edges. There are rows of classics in no particular order, Chaucer, Goethe, and Voltaire. Marcus Aurelius and Molière, Marlowe and Montaigne. Several Dickens, a few Thomas Hardy, and Dante.

She inspects further and spies biographies of Garrick, Palmerston, Marquis de Lafayette, Benjamin Franklin, and Banjo Patterson. These bore her so she moves on.

Below he has Kipling next to Keats, Coleridge's _Rime of the Ancient Mariner_ kisses Collins' _The Moonstone_. _Memoires de Vidocq_ and _Arsène Lupin_ lead into _The Red Thumb Mark_ and _The Murder of Roger Ackroyd_. Conan Doyle and _Rue Morgue _sit next to H. Rider Haggard. _She_, of course.

Phryne lingers here, but then shifts a shelf lower, bending over to read the titles of books on ancient history and archeology, about how the earth births the ruins of civilizations. There are texts on constellations, the stars in the sky. On the ocean, the vastness of seas. Travel books from when authors still believed the world had edges – and maybe it still does.

(She ignores a large green folio he has expropriated from Collins entitled _Exotica of the Far East_.)

One book is set out, his collected Shakespeare, not yet back in its place, the passage from _Twelfth Night_ still clearly marked by a piece of blue paper. She thumbs past it, stopping only where the pages themselves fall open. _If it be love indeed, tell me how much_, she reads. His notes are etched into the margins, old blue ink faded beneath his more recent black.

She closes the book on his questions.

At the very bottom the books are shelved haphazardly, set horizontally so she has to kneel down and pull them out to see what they are. He can't see her reaction as she holds Clausewitz's _On War_, and then blows dust from _Marriage and Divorce in Australia_ and the weightier, _Divorce in the State of Victoria, Precedent and Proceeding, Volume Two_.

She returns them carefully and rises slowly, keeping her back to him.

War changes everything.

But so does love.

There's only one framed picture on all the shelves and she takes it up with childish and unconcealed delight. It's her, making faces at the camera when he very nearly arrested her for breaking and entering during the Green Mill murder. She's got her hands curled up like spectacles over her eyes, her mouth pouting, impish and impertinent and absolutely irrepressible.

She holds it close in her hands and turns to him at last.

"Why did you let me go?" she asks and all the scabs are ripped off their bleeding hearts.

He comes to stand beside her.

"Why didn't you want to stay?"

She doesn't answer and Rilke echoes in his head: _How shall I hold my soul so it does not touch on yours._

"If you love someone, you'll always let them go," he says because he finds the silence capricious and tiresome. "If they come back, it was meant to be. If not, it wasn't."

Perhaps it's not right, but there it is. He watches her slowly realize the extent of his love for her, that he will do what he wants least because it is what (she thinks) she wants most.

It hasn't been easy, far from it, especially in the nights when he remembers the taste of her skin and the feel of her body next to his, or in the days when he's missed her fierce banter and the way she waltzes into his life, slow and close and utterly intoxicating.

She thinks she wants space and time and independence – these neat and uncluttered things – but what she really wants is a relationship, warm and heavy and messy and real.

They want the same thing, but they've both been going about it all wrong.

Phryne puts the picture back, reluctantly letting go of the past.

He waits.

At last she takes a breath and turns to him.

"I should have stayed," she admits.

"I shouldn't have let you go," he answers.

She comes at him like a whirlwind, and he knows now how much she's missed him too. There is part of him that wants her to come like this, to take and be taken in a rush and flurry. But there's also another part of him that's waited for her, that waits for her still, that's unbearably patient, that wants the savor and succor of this, them, her; not a surfeit.

Jack stops her with a well-practiced hand that comes up between them, a movement which has stopped traffic quickly and efficiently, usually to the squeal of brakes and belated bleat of horns.

Phryne comes up short and holds there in front of him, right where he wants her (for now, anyway).

In another room the cellist is playing, notes flying as the musician moves across the fingerboard.

Slowly Jack walks around her in a circle, inspecting. He knows she's used to his silence, his stillness, and this throws her off guard. But as she's made him wait, he too will make her. Patience is his strong suit, even if it's not exactly hers.

He returns to face her and takes her in, breathes in slowly and carefully her beauty, the dark fringe of her hair, the lilt of her chin, the light in her eyes, the fidgety impatience beneath her skin.

Gently he fingers the edge of the burnt orange scarf around her neck.

She's always wanted to pull off his tie; tonight, he's gotten to her first.

He twines the silk around his hand, testing the warp and weft of it. Then he pulls the fabric just so it slides along her skin like a shiver, around the back of her neck where it meets her dark hairline, where her vertebrae bump outward in the line of her spine.

It comes away like the flutter of a Monarch's wings, just a swish and whisper.

He isn't sure but he thinks one of her knees just buckled.

Now her eyes narrow, and he watches her chin tilt up, her game face come on, mask-like and impenetrable, except for the glimmer of a smile.

She takes his hands in hers, sliding from nail to knuckle to wrist. Her thumbs press into his pulse; her fingers bite into the lines of his veins and then move to the edge of his shirt-sleeve. She traces the circlet of fabric all the way around. Then she reverses the toggle of one cufflink and pulls it free. It comes out and away with a snap that startles them both. She does the same for the second.

He counters by kneeling before her and moving to the complicated buckles of her heeled shoes, undoing each t-strap. His fingers brush over the top of her foot, the bone of her ankle, the curl of her heel. He traces the ticklish lines of her tendons to the curved arches of her soles as he removes one sandal, then the other.

She shivers against him when he rises to meet her but he can feel her impatience as she outlines the ridges and channels of his body under the cut of his white shirt. With her fingers she smoothes the fabric from chest to neck until she hooks her fingers on the first button at his throat.

She lets it pop between her fingers.

He didn't realize he'd been holding his breath until it rushes from his chest.

Phryne smiles deliciously.

She unfastens each button, working through the row of them, diligent and unhurried. At last she pushes the garment open so that it seems to bloom outward and roll off his shoulders like wings of his own. It falls off like heavy armor, leaving him bare before her.

She rests her hands on the skin of his chest, feeling the beat beneath her fingers.

Her pulse matches his as he touches the citrine sparkles of her drop earrings. He doesn't really need to be so close to slide the delicate hooks from her lobes, to feel the echo of his breath against her skin, to press his lips against the edge of her ear, the twist of her neck, the swallow-curves of her throat, but he is anyway.

He settles the jewels on the open pages of Rilke's poems so the German words shine through the stones, so they somehow become magnified and bold in reflection, in geologic translation. In the German there's only one word he can see now, _zusammen_, but he knows the line by heart.

_Doch alles, was uns anrührt, dich und mich,nimmt uns zusammen wie ein Bogenstrich,der aus zwei Saiten eine Stimme zieht..._

Outside thunder crackles but inside Phryne's eyes are darker than storm, and her fingers, wickedly nimble every other time she touches him are now stumbling, fumbling, and deliberately clumsy as they settle on the metal edges of his belt, unhooking the buckle and oh-so-slowly pulling the leather free.

It clunks as loud as his heart when it hits the floor.

Now he takes her against him, resting his hands on her hips, letting his palms rock against the round bones there. He slides backward, over another kind of roundness altogether, and down the backs of her thighs to the ticklish v's of her knees, bending until he kneels before her. This time his hands move up, against the grain, towards her warm center.

She gasps as he slides the tips of his fingers underneath the lace edge of her stockings. He kisses her there, where he can't tell the difference between skin and silk. This time she really does sway against him, her fingers twined in his hair, nails to his scalp. Her head is thrown back as he looks up, as his thumb catches on the snaps of her garters, as he undoes each tiny clasp, rolling the stockings off one by one, tracing downward from thigh to knee to ankle to toes.

Outside thunder roars overhead but they hear nothing as he rises, as she reaches for his pants, taking with them his boots and socks.

He responds by pulling the dress over her head and taking the bandeau and everything else that is between her body and his with it.

Skin to skin they half-stumble, half-carry each other to his bed with its grey throw and white sheets. The prickle of wool bites his shoulders as he comes down first and she settles on top of him.

The first roll against each other makes them both groan. She does it again, just to make sure. Then she pushes back and settles onto him in a long slide that takes both their breath away.

The silence of the room echoes around them as she moves.

He slides his hands over her spine, feeling the movement echo from bone to muscle to skin. She rubs at the magnetic suck between them until he can no longer tell where one begins and the other leaves off. Together they move in this new rhythm until she stiffens and cries out, held only in his hands as he follows her.

Outside rain knocks on the windows without answer.

* * *

/ - / - /- /

* * *

The morning begins with vibrant sunshine and the tootle of cars outside his window.

Phryne drinks coffee in his bed and watches him shave. Eventually she rises and they bathe together, water rinsing sweat from their skin.

They dress slowly, reluctantly pulling armor against the world around their skins.

They are moving backward, but yet at the same time going forward too.

He unfurls her stockings from toe to ankle, from knee to thigh, fastening them to her garter straps.

She buttons his shirt, tucks it in and threads his belt.

He does up the back of her dress; he ties the sash at her waist.

She fastens his cufflinks, she knots his tie.

He sees her into her beige coat.

She holds the suit jacket as he slips it over his shoulders.

He tilts the hat onto her head; she tops the brown fedora (the one she bought him) on his.

Underneath its brim she smiles, leans over and kisses him.

It's not long or slow, or fast or hard, but it's enough to know that they're reading from the same book again, if not exactly on the same page. He's never imagined that this, she, them, would be easy, but maybe now it won't be so bloody hard. Jack Robinson doesn't know how the story ends, and maybe it won't, but he can't wait to find out how it begins.

* * *

/ - / - /- /

* * *

He opens the door, and hand in hand, they walk forward together.

* * *

/ - / - /- /

* * *

.


	3. Mine

Title: Days of Jade, Nights of Onyx

Chapter 3: Mine

Author: Elliott Silver

Timeline: Set after the end of "Dead Air" …

Summary: A pastiche of scenes from Jack and Phryne's newest joint venture. Jack may send her reeling, but he won't let her fall.

Note: Apologies for the delay. Life inconveniently intervened in writing.

* * *

/ - / - / - /

* * *

"_We're all alone …"_

Their voices blend together as Jack's nimble fingers run over the keys of the piano.

" … _no chaperone _…"

She's sent Bert and Cec, a bit merrier on fine champagne, into the night; seen off the newly-engaged lovebirds and sent Dot to bed; and finally bid Mr. Butler a fond goodnight. Aunt P. had stayed the latest, until Phryne had practically pushed her out. The piano had sounded then and her aunt had turned to protest, but she had already closed the door. She stood with her back against it, closing her eyes as a delicious smile lit on her face.

"_The world's in slumber …_"

She has enjoyed this latest venture with Archibald Jones – the surprisingly golden tie, the color of gorse; the suave rumble of his voice over the airwaves; the way his shoulders fill out the comfortable brown herringbone of his suit and the edge of fair isle sweater beneath; the conscious holding-apart and yearning distance of undercover work – but all the same, she's glad to have Jack Robinson back.

Jack had told her about his undercover assignment, of course. Sounds intriguing, she'd replied to Collins, but it wasn't. Bloody frustrating was what it was. She's hardly seen him, Jack, since the murder of Louisa Singleton and his "work" at Radio 3JH, except professionally (and that doesn't count). They had discreetly worked up to spending two or three nights a week together, and Phryne felt his recent absence like a loss. The sharpness of it startles her, the depth of her need for him, the fierce and relentless spark he creates within her.

In time with the distant music she moves and pours herself a drink. She kicks off her shoes and stands barefoot, savoring the fine bubbles of champagne and the way his melody takes wing against her skin.

She goes to him then, standing in the darkened doorway and watching his fingers kiss the ivory keys. He looks up only as she finally comes in and sits beside him, her hand on his thigh. The tune changes and their voices come together as if they hadn't been apart.

"_Let's misbehave_."

She waits until the last note has faded and then stands, the heavy beads on her dress rasping in the movement. She offers him her hand to go upstairs. Jack takes it, but he doesn't rise, not to move, not to follow her.

Instead he pulls her around and settles her in front of him.

He touches her then, running his hands over her dress, the heavy beading, the pearls and jet baubles, the bright silver paillettes. She can hardly feel his weight through the garment and she hates it.

So does he as he pulls the straps of her dress over each shoulder so the heavy material (like wearing wet concrete, really) falls away in a great crash, crumpling indelicately to the floor.

For a long moment (or maybe more, she's lost sense of time) he simply enjoys looking at her. The night air is cool on her skin as she stands before him clad only in her camiknickers, and black silk flares against her pale skin. Cherishes is not too strong a word for the depth of feeling that skims and sinks through his dark pupils, the heartwood color of his irises, and she feels his eyes heavier than his hands.

Then – at long last – contact. His deep breath matches hers, and she closes her eyes to his touch. His hands settle on the wings of her hips. The calluses of his fingers rasp on her hipbones, a tender roughness she has missed to the edge of madness.

The bench screeches on the floor as he moves and then stands too, boosting her to the lid of the piano.

A cacophony of sound – no less than the one in her blood – fills the room as her legs, the back of her calves, come down with crash on the high keys. Rhythm vibrates, electric and unsung, between them.

Jack sits back down, settling himself as if he's going to play another song, and perhaps he is, but surely now it's a different one, with different notes.

His fingers trace her ankles, her knees, her thighs until he reaches the softness of her drawers. She lifts and he pulls them away, sliding them from her skin and dropping them to the floor with her dress.

Now his mouth follows his hands, tracing the curves of her stomach, the crescents of her ribs. He kisses her navel, traces an orchid with his tongue, and dips lower.

She leans back and a deep chord reverberates against her spine.

He looks at her, his eyes dark and intimate and knowing, and she meets his gaze. Jack reaches up and puts the flat of his palm on her chest, pushing her backward until she is lying on the top of the piano, spread in front of him. The coldness of the slick surface shocks her but his touch creates jetstreams of heat across her skin. Normally she would complain about the uneven surface, the roughened wood, but now all that matters is the way he pulls her legs around him, settling them on the pillars of his shoulders, the way it's only his breath she feels first, the warm exhalation of air against the inner skin of her thigh. He kisses her there, first one side, then the other, his mouth moving closer to her center.

When finally he does touch her, it's only the lightest lap of his tongue against her.

It's enough.

She bucks against him, and breaks contact. Her one leg crashes down on the piano keys, her back arching like a fingernail moon (certainly a flexibility she thought she had lost and will surely feel tomorrow), her gasp breaking apart shadows.

Jack's hands come around her, cupping the roundness of her seat to keep her in place.

This is what she loves about him (and somewhere in the back of her mind, she realizes she's chosen a new but very specific word for their relationship), that he holds her steady. He may send her reeling, but he won't let her fall.

"Steady me anytime, Inspector," she'd said, and she meant it. Phryne trusts him when she trusts so little else.

She comes back to him now and unfurls around him, curls her legs around the back of his head, buckling her knees around his neck, pressing herself toward him, relaxing into him, opening herself to him.

His chuckle echoes against her, into her, as he comes back and his mouth closes on her, tongue tracing the folds of her flesh, and then – in the space between her breaths – delving deeper.

There are things Jack Robinson can do with his tongue that she never imagined and which she intends (in more lucid moments) to spend a great deal of time examining.

But now – now – heat builds within her, and she feels the first feathery rushes inside her, the warm ebb and low of them as he touches her. She tries to hold on to it, the building frenzy, but she can't and he brings her to the pitch of release, holding her as she breaks against him, back convulsing off the hard flatness of the piano, nails sliding against its slick surface, her gasp echoing around them, circling the still air and coming back to rest as faint whispers on her skin.

She lays back and feels her body heaving in the aftermath, her skin flushed, blood pulsing so hard she can feel its frantic movement in her wrists and throat. She wants to raise her head, to see him, but she is heavy, pinned back to the earth after she so briefly left it, and all she can do is lie here, shivering at the whisper of wet kisses he presses to the skin of her thighs, to the tip of her knees.

Jack's fingers settle again on the keys, and after a fuzzy minute, she realizes he is playing the jingle for Flamboyance washing powder. Idly she kicks at him and he laughs (that low, deep rumble of his), and changes to a tune she doesn't know but likes immediately. She listens, spent and content.

At last she sits, forcing her spent body upright. Jack stops playing to look at her. She slides forward (with some difficulty, as her damp skin sticks to the polished surface of the piano), and comes to the floor in front of him.

Phryne pulls him up from his seat. She tastes the sweetness of herself on his lips as she kisses him, and beneath it, the warmth that is him. That's the best part of it, she thinks, knowing how they taste, how they feel, how they sound when their bodies break and fold together. They _know_.

And while she enjoys the fact that he is fully dressed and she is not, now she intends to remedy that. She takes him with her and they go together upstairs into the filmy darkness of her bedroom.

She sprawls on the bed and watches him undress, the unhurried and meticulous way he removes waistcoat, shirt, belt, trousers, folding and setting down the garments on her dressing chair, stripping everything until he too is bare.

Across the darkened room his eyes meet hers, a slow smile drawing up on his face as he comes to her.

There's no shyness between them now. Somehow they've fallen into an uncomplicated monogamous relationship. Admittedly this is harder for her than him, but she feels that deeply, the miraculous wonder of it, that he is all she needs. She remembers a line from Lawrence, that deep fidelity came not from public morality or swearing religious oaths, but from the oneness between a man and woman that made casual sex, or any infidelity, an impossibility.

When Jack touches her now, she realizes just how true that is, how impossible it would be for her, now, to want anyone else.

It shocks her to her very core, and it gives her a peace she's never known.

She breathes his name, lets it fill her lungs and speed her blood along her veins. "Call me Jack," he'd said, and she does. "Call me Phryne," she'd responded, and he does too. They smudge their names against each other, "Phryne" along her skin when he kisses her, "Jack" in his mouth as she pulls them together. They didn't say each other's names much at first, too conscious of possessing the other aloud, the newly intimate way they colonized each other, laid claim to their being. Now words are easier, they banter. She provokes, he counters, they laugh, and the sound of mirth mingles with pleasure and the snap of breath.

Although, like tonight, sometimes they say nothing at all.

He comes into her and everything goes silent except for the crush of blood in her ears. This is her favorite part of every encounter, the solid connection of their bodies coming together. She wraps a leg around him, opening the angle of their joining so he slides to hilt. The jolt of it makes her gasp, and for a second, she just holds him still to feel it.

Then he moves and the rest becomes a blur. There is no he or she, just them, a coming together so complete that she is lost in its power except for the fact that her hand is wound into his, except for the fact that he, Jack, holds them together.

Later in the darkness, their breathing steadies and she thinks about their earlier celebration, the happy announcement of Dot and Hugh's engagement. At the same time, though, she thinks about the precariousness even of simple joys, of certain love, in this most modern of worlds. Perhaps happy endings are no longer as simple as they used to be.

"What did you tell Hugh?" she asks. "Confidential police information" or not, she wants to know.

"I told him to run away, now, without looking back."

Her elbow comes into his ribs and Jack grunts, eventually with laughter when he breathes again.

"I told him to consider the paradox of pursuing the modern woman."

He doesn't elaborate, but she understands what he means and is touched by it, by the depths of a patience that is not now just his alone, but one he has shared with the younger man. That the things worth having are those worth working for, no less treasured (and perhaps more so) for being difficult and complicated.

"What did you tell Dot?" Jack asks her in return.

For a moment Phryne doesn't know how to answer him, doesn't know how to explain. Things are different for married women, and men don't understand. This is why she has never wanted to marry. But at the same time, things change. That's the beauty and hope of it, that they can.

They will.

She rolls herself against Jack, his body warm against hers as they fit together.

"I told her she would always be my right hand woman."

Jack's voice is already deep and drowsy with sleep when he answers her, but Phryne treasures his two words, and holds them close to her heart as she too closes her eyes on a hope greater than she ever imagined.

* * *

/ - / - / - /

* * *

"You're mine."

* * *

/ - / - / - /

* * *

.


End file.
